The present invention relates to electronic healthcare management, and more specifically, a personalized electronic healthcare management system capable of retrieving health-care related information personalized to patients needs, and performing automated acquisition of the social service programs to help patients manage their medical conditions.
Today, the delivery of routine and emergency healthcare related information may be very time consuming. There is an increased burden in managing healthcare for rapidly aging populations, such as chronic diseases. There are also several concerns with establishing and resolving insurance coverage and medical treatment costs, and searching for and locating the relevant medical expertise that is familiar with a patient's condition and associated insurance information. In addition, there are concerns regarding maintaining longitudinal records of medicines and patient's family medical history, and finding and using the applicable governmental social support programs that would provide financial and social benefits are slowly being recognized as pivotal hindrances to providing a high standard of healthcare.
Currently there are massive amounts of healthcare information in cyberspace, ranging from government and business maintained resources to Web 2.0 user-generated content, e.g., wikis, blogs, and online healthcare discussion groups. Unfortunately, this information is not being effectively leveraged for several reasons such as the sources are diverse in syntax, semantics and structural representation and the sources are fragmented across a large distributed network. In addition, information regarding social support programs, such as transportation programs, financial assistance programs, and in-house support services, are not available in intuitive locations that are easily accessible to the patients. Further, patients have to rely on labor-intensive, manual, paper-based processes to work with administrators of these social programs, which normally lower the probability of acquiring benefits successfully.